by David Safier
This isn't fair, I know. It's a single incident. But for me, it's the whole Republican "I care so much about children and poor people" song and dance wrapped up in a pretty little package with a bow on top.
Rep. Steve Buyer (R-IN) runs the Frontier Foundation. It's been around for 6 years. Its purpose is to help students get through college. It has raised about $900,000, mostly from health care and pharmaceutical interests. Did I mention Buyer is on the House Energy Subcommittee on Health? Consider it mentioned.
How much has he spent on scholarships from that $900,000 over the past 6 years? Not a penny. But Buyer has taken plenty of golf junkets.
Buyer now admits to the Indianapolis Star that a lot of those unitemized foundation expenses were for golf outings with corporate donors at, among other places, Disney World, the Atlantis resort in the Bahamas, and the Phoenix-area Boulders resort.
Not to worry, though — Buyer tells the paper he doesn't even enjoy the trips, saying it's "not fun for me" and the travel is "work."
In the back of my head, I hear echoes of other "we love children and poor people so much" foundations by, I think, people like Tom Delay. Some golfing extravaganzas at Republican conventions lurk in the background of my memory. Can't remember the exact details though.
And I know how much our Republican state legislators love children when they try to save vouchers or defend tuition tax credits. Not so much when it comes to funding those bloated public education bureaucracies or those giveaway children's health care programs. But whenever it's convenient, boy, do they love them some children and poor people!
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To be honest, I’d have more respect for conservatives who came right out and said it:
“I’m a Conservative, and I work very hard on behalf of the elites, the wealthy and the privileged, especially the corporate entities and industrial groups they own. They pay me very well for my representation and I feel that I owe it to them to not waste my time pretending to care about anyone else. Their interests are pretty plain: they don’t want to pay tax, they want me to make sure they get a big wad back from the public till in the form of corporate welfare and otherwise they just want to be left alone (especially when it comes to pesky regulations telling them what kind of production-killing ‘safety’ and environmental rules they have to follow.)
As far as kids are concerned, I only care about the kids of the elites and the privileged, because they’re the only ones that count. I’m a strict Social Darwinist and think that it is a waste of tax money to spend it on the children of the poor. The only way I support spending it on them is to pay for more law enforcement, courts and prisons.